


Static and Silence

by fourteenlines



Category: Farscape
Genre: Gen, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-11-15
Updated: 2002-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-04 12:40:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourteenlines/pseuds/fourteenlines
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sound cannot survive in a vacuum anymore than you can.  A post-UR fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Static and Silence

**Author's Note:**

> The Bordello girls give the best challenges. A Writing Sound Fic. I think I stole the title from an album by The Sundays, but that's just too damn bad.

For a moment, every sound imaginable resonates in your head. The creeping of insects on faraway planets, the cries of wounded lovers and the footsteps of gods and men. White, clamorous, infinite and consuming. A thousand realities screaming in your brain. And then. All of it stops. Your eyes take over again.

You don't believe what you see, and your heart slows in shock. It makes up for it a second later, when it pounds, pounds, reverberating in your chest. Hearts race, they say, and it is, like horses' hooves that you feel in your sternum more than your ear.

The sound of your own voice startles you, because. There is no sound in space. Light travels in space. Electromagnetic waves, or particles, they're still not sure which. But sound. Sound cannot survive in a vacuum anymore than you can.

You call out your maydays, because it feels like something to do, and it staves off silence. Your ears ring and ring and ring when you finally realize you're only using your oxygen more quickly.

(Maybe an angel gets his wings.)

With your internal comm switched off, you discover silence for the first time in your life. Not even the rasp, rasp, rasp of your echoed breathing. And you find that silence is anything but. Impossible, imperceptible sounds, the rush of blood through your veins and the stretch of the muscles in your throat when you swallow and crack of a joint when you move and the too-fast, too-shallow sounds your lungs make and you realize that this is living, this is you. You wonder what dying sounds like. If it's a slow, slow, slow, cease of sound or if everything gets louder until you are nothing, nothing at all but noise.

(Perfect silence is a rich symphony all its own.)

And. you. think. that. maybe. it's. that. last. one. after all. because. as. your. heart. slows. and. your. lungs. begin. to. labor. every. second. stretches. to. two. and. every. sound. rushes. at. twice. the. speed. of. light.

(Death as inversion. A clean and mathematical concept.)

So much you've heard the last four years has been untrue. Problematic translations and protestations of something almost like affection. Silence is a welcome alternative when your head can be so loud.

Your eyes slide shut. You drift while ten miles below you a siren races up someone's spine, a whisper tickles someone's skin, a child is awoken by a tremor of distant thunder.

Crackle, crash, whoosh. Crackle. Uh. This is Canaveral. Crackle, crash, whoosh.

You swim awake. Static on your comm. "This is Canaveral. Please identify yourself."

You smile. Maybe it sounds like home.

\--

end


End file.
